Paradise Garden eBook

“Of course, if that is your desire,” I
managed at last, “I have nothing to say except
that if you had asked my opinion I should have advised
against it.”

“I’m sorry, Canby,” he finished,
“but the matter has already been taken out of
your hands.”

Youth fortunately is the age of the most lasting impressions.
Dr. Carmichael, of the Hobart School of Finance of
Manhattan University, came and went, but he made no
appreciable ripple in the placid surface of Jerry’s
philosophy. He cast stone after stone into the
lovely pool of Jerry’s thoughts, which broke
the colorful reflections into smaller images, but
did not change them. And when he was gone the
pool was as before he came. Jerry listened politely
as he did to all his masters and learned like a parrot
what was required of him, but made no secret of his
missing interest and enthusiasm. I watched furtively,
encouraging Jerry, as my duty was, to do his tasks
as they were set before him. But I knew then
what I had suspected before, that they would never
make a bond-broker of Jerry. I had but to say
a word, to give but a sign and bring about an overt
rebellion. But I was too wise to do that.
I merely watched the widening circles in the pool and
saw them lost in the border of dreamland.

Jerry learned, of course, the difference between a
mortgage and an insurance policy; he knew the meaning
of economics, the theory of supply and demand, and
gained a general knowledge which I couldn’t
have given him of the general laws of barter and trade.
But he followed Carmichael listlessly. What did
he care for bonds and receiverships when the happy
woods were at his elbow, the wild-flowers beckoning,
his bird neighbors calling? Where I had appealed
to Jerry through his imagination, Carmichael used
only the formulae of matter and fact. There was
but one way in which he could have succeeded, and
that was through the picture of the stupendous agencies
of which Jerry was to be the master: the fast-flying
steamers, the monster engines on their miles of rails,
the glowing furnaces, the sweating figures in the
heat and grime of smoke and steam, the energy, the
inarticulate power, the majesty of labor which bridged
oceans, felled mountains and made animate the sullen
rock. All this I saw, as one day Jerry should
see it. But I did not speak. The time was
not yet. Jerry’s understanding of these
things would come, but not until I had prepared him
for them.

CHAPTER IV

ENTER EVE

This memoir is not so much the history of a boy or
of a man as of an experiment. Therefore I will
not longer delay in bringing Jerry to the point where
my philosophy and John Benham’s was to be put
to the test. I have tried to indicate in as few
phrases as possible Jerry Benham’s essential
characteristics, the moral attributes that were his
and the shapeliness and strength of his body.
I have never set great value on mere physical beauty,
which too often reacts unpleasantly upon the character
of its owner. But looks meant nothing to Jerry
and he was as unconscious of his striking beauty as
the scarlet poppy that nods in the meadow.